In the End, Climate Change Is the Only Story That Matters | #alaska | #politics

(Gratuitous Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

While we watch the disembowelment of various lawyers in the employ of a former president* and wrap ourselves in the momentum of the upcoming midterm elections, the climate crisis—its time and tides—waits for no one. Every other story in our politics is a sideshow now. Every other issue, no matter how large it looms in the immediate present, is secondary to the accumulating evidence that the planet itself (or at least large parts of it) may be edging toward uninhabitability.

All summer, the main climate story was the worldwide drought. Reservoirs dried up, rivers shrank, huge rock walls showed “bathtub rings” as markers of where all the water used to be. Lake Mead gave up its forgotten mob victims, and rivers in the Balkans gave up Nazi ships scuttled almost 80 years ago, one step ahead of the Red Army. All of which was fairly interesting, but when you’re thirsty, archaeology is no substitute for water.

Now, though, it’s fall again, running toward winter, and for people who live near the seacoast and on islands, that means it’s cyclonic storm season again; and cyclonic storm systems are now bigger and stronger and more relentless than they’ve ever been, strengthened every year by the accumulating dynamics of the climate crisis.

By the end of this week, Hurricane Fiona—which already had torn up Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda, and the Turks and Caicos—was building up strength again as it moved north and took dead aim at Nova Scotia and the rest of Atlantic Canada.

From the Washington Post:

Ahead of Fiona, the Canadian Hurricane Centre has issued a hurricane watch for portions of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Iles-de-la-Madeleine and Newfoundland. “Hurricane Fiona has the potential to be a landmark weather event in Eastern Canada this weekend,” the Centre tweeted.

Usually, Atlantic Canada gets battered by winter storms roaring in from the North Atlantic. Its encounters with tropical hurricanes usually consist of withstanding their remnants. At worst, a hurricane comes ashore in this region as a Category 2 storm, as was the case with Hurricane Juan. Even the legendary Nova Scotia Cyclone of 1873, which came up on roughly the same track as Fiona seems to be following, and which sank 1,200 boats and killed 500 people, probably came ashore as a Category 1 storm. If Fiona strikes as a Category 3 or 4, it will be a historic storm for that part of the world.

And Fiona has cousins lining up behind it.

Fiona is one of five different systems that meteorologists are carefully tracking in the Atlantic, which has roared to life amid the peak of hurricane season. There’s also Tropical Storm Gaston, which is centered 375 miles west-northwest of the Azores over the northeast Atlantic. The Azores are under tropical storm warnings, and could see conditions deteriorate Friday and remain inclement through late Saturday. In addition, a tropical wave exiting the coast of Senegal in Africa could strengthen into a named storm in the next few days. There is also a disturbance midway between Africa and South America that could gradually develop. Of potentially high concern is another fledgling storm that could deliver a serious blow to the Gulf or Caribbean.

It will be maddening to see all the news stories about the damage done by these storms, and about the people left homeless and without electricity or clean drinking water, which will not put these facts in the context of the climate crisis. This is the only way any of the other stories make sense. The storms are bigger, stronger, and they maintain their strength for longer—and all of that is a consequence of the changes that we have wrought to the climate. At this point, to cover these massive weather events without mentioning the underlying dynamic that drives them is like covering a war without mentioning explosives.

But at the other end of the world, there was an even more catastrophic storm in which the climate crisis was directly involved. Climate has changed the weather in this place, and it has changed the history of it, too. It was a place in which human beings and polar bears depended for their livelihoods upon sea ice that isn’t there any more, at least not when it’s supposed to be.

In 1871, a fleet of 33 whaling ships in pursuit of bowhead whales became trapped in the ice off Point Belcher, a small outcrop in far northwestern Alaska that reaches out into the Chukchi Sea 100 miles south of Point Barrow. The captains agreed to abandon the ships, leaving behind goods estimated to be worth $1.6 million, including the entire season’s haul of whale oil and baleen from that year’s hunting. Then the 1,200 men, women, and children (it was customary for captains to bring their entire families along on voyages these songs) made a harrowing journey across the Arctic wilderness as the pressure of the ice slowly crushed the ships they left behind.

And all of this happened…in August.

Once, the ice was strong enough for human beings and polar bears to go out and hunt on it every year before Labor Day. This was fortunate for all concerned, because the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea were the places that typhoons went to die. They would come roaring up the Western Pacific, bludgeoning the Philippines, or Taiwan, or Japan, or the Koreas. Then they would beat themselves to death on the sea ice or, if they managed to make it to shore, would exhaust their energy on the solid permafrost back behind the beaches.

Last week, the remnants of Typhoon Merbok slammed into hundreds of miles of Alaskan coastline. There was no ice to slow it down and most of the permafrost was gone, so the heavy rainfall made the earth unreliable. Houses came off their foundations. One was spotted sailing down a river until it snagged on a bridge. The typhoon came ashore with the strength of a tropical storm, if not an actual hurricane. From Alaska Public Radio:

National Weather Service climatologist Brian Brettschneider described the storm on Saturday as the “worst-case scenario.” Forecasters had predicted earlier this week that it could be one of the worst storms to hit Alaska’s western coast in recent history. And it was. “In some places, this is clearly the worst storm in living memory,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks climatologist Rick Thoman. Hundreds of people across multiple communities are sheltering in schools, which are serving as emergency evacuation centers. In some communities, local leaders’ early actions helped residents do what they needed to move valuable vehicles and boats to higher ground. In other communities, the storm overwhelmed efforts. “This is the first time I’ve seen it this bad,” said Alvina Imgalrea in Chevak. In Napakiak, Job Hale said, “It’s just a lake everywhere.”

The climate crisis has taken away all of Alaska’s natural defenses, so now it takes the full fury of storms that in earlier days would never have made landfall intact. They would have expended themselves on the frozen sea or shattered on the rock-hard earth.

A while back, I spent a week on Shishmaref, a barrier island in the Chukchi Sea a little bit north of where the typhoon struck two weeks ago. Because of the retreating sea ice and vanishing permafrost, Shishmaref, which has been continuously occupied in one way or another for 4,000 years, is itself vanishing into the ocean. One day—if nothing changes, or perhaps even if something does—Shishmaref will be gone.

The people I met there have no doubt that the climate crisis is real. They know they can’t hunt on the ice the way that they had for millennia. The season is shorter and the ice less reliable. Every winter now, somebody from the village or the surrounding area is lost because they fell through the ice. The thawing permafrost means the people of the village have lost what they called “the Eskimo freezer,” the practice of burying seal meat to preserve it. When I was there, the people in the village were working with state officials to build a road to a gravel quarry from which they could gather the material to build a road that would allow them to move off the island. I found this almost unbearably poignant as well as infuriating.

To stand on the bluffs above the Chukchi Sea, looking down at a series of broken and ruined seawalls that have already failed to hold back the power of the ocean, and to consider that there are politicians in this country who are unwilling to do anything about the climate crisis, or who even deny it exists, is to wish they all could come and stand on these bluffs and look out at the relentless, devouring sea.